Slashdot Mirror

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: An initiative, fronted by Danish law firm Njord and backed by known international copyright trolls Guardaley, made headlines when it began targeting the customers of several ISPs, including Telia, Tele2 and Bredbandsbolaget, the provider that was previously ordered to block The Pirate Bay. At the time it was unclear how many people the law firm had in its sights but the situation has become more clear following a recent legal development. Sweden's new Patent and Market Court, that was formed last year to handle specialist copyright complaints, handed down a ruling on Friday. It grants Njord and its partners the right to force ISP Telia to hand over the personal details of subscribers behind thousands of IP addresses, despite the ISP's objections. Telia says that although it places great value on its subscribers' right to privacy, complying with a court order is a legal requirement. In all, subscribers behind 5,300 Telia IP addresses will be affected, with claims that each unlawfully downloaded and shared a range of movie titles including CELL, IT, London Has Fallen, Mechanic: Resurrection, Criminal and September of Shiraz. All have featured in previous Guardaley trolling cases in the United States. It's not known how many of the 5,300 IP addresses Telia will be able to match to subscribers, or whether each IP address will identify a unique subscriber, but it's safe to say that thousands of households will be affected. "There is probable cause of infringement of copyright in the films in that they were unlawfully made available to the public via file sharing networks," the Court wrote in its judgement. "The applicants' interest in having access to the information outweighs any opposing interests, including the interest of the individual [subscribers] to remain anonymous." A Telia press spokesperson told SVT: "We believe that our customers' privacy is incredibly important, but now we must comply with this court decision."

Anonymous Pirate writes "Operators of The Pirate Bay stand trial on Monday in Stockholm. The four defendants from the popular file-sharing web site are charged with being accessories to breaking copyright law and may face fines or up to two years in prison if found guilty. The four defendants have run the site since 2004 after it was started in 2003 by the Swedish anti-copyright organization Piratbyrån. The Swedish public service television announced that they are going to send a live audio stream from the trial. It will be broadcast without editing or translation."

A few quick updates on some recent Slashdot stories in Slashback tonight. We have some additional information on the ever-interesting hundred-dollar laptop, the ongoing flap over the trademarking of 'Web 2.0' for conferences, and the shutdown of the Pirate Bay site. Read on for details.

Update on the One Laptop per Child Project. dominique_cimafranca writes "Ethan Zuckerman gives a report on his visit to the headquarters of the One Laptop per Child project. Some details on practical design considerations such as the hinge, the rabbit ears, and why the hand crank was ultimately left out (apparently, Kofi Annan broke the crank on a prototype). Several pictures, and a look at the motherboard of the OLPC laptop."

TOR Calls Out Torvalds, Stallman on Web 2.0. theodp writes "In an unusual defense of partner CMP's trademarking of Web 2.0, Tim O'Reilly points a finger at Linus Torvalds and Richard Stallman in his rebuttal posts. TOR also says the blogger who posted the O'Reilly-approved cease-and-desist letter from CMP 'owes us an apology for the way he responded' (he got one)."

Fallout from The Pirate Bay Raid. Tyler Too writes "The Swedish national police website has been taken offline by a denial of service attack which started Thursday night. That's not the only fallout from the raid on The Pirate Bay: there's a demonstration planned in Stockholm on Saturday."

U.S. Government Ordered The Pirate Bay Shutdown? mkro writes "According to the Swedish government sponsored tv channel SVT, U.S. government officials -- after being approached by the MPAA -- requested the Swedish justice department to take down The Pirate Bay. According to the story, the Swedish justice department asked police and prosecution to act, but when they explained the laws are too vague, they turned directly to the state attorney and the chief of the national police force."

Jacob Lundqvist wrote in to tell us that a report about Linux was shown on prime-time Swedish television. Hit below to read his report. Jacob's report follows:

"One of the the National TV channels in Sweden did an feature in today's prime time news (Rapport 19:30) where they talked about the new alternatives to traditional OS's "for example Microsoft"

Basically they mixed OSS and linux - it wasn't a technical thing - it was for the general public.

First was the obligatory introduction to this phenomena that Linus started, and a interview with Linus, and some short mention of OSS and what it stands for.

They interviewed Mr Cary Carp, IT-manager at the Swedish Museum of Natural History www.nrm.se, the largest museum in Sweden, who described how the museum has been using linux as their server OS for several years (Nice zoom-in of a RedHat 5.0 box ;)

The newsreader concluded that OSS in general and Linux in particular was an interesting new path for the computing industry and radically different from the older traditional purely commercial companies in the buisness (zoom in on a mamoth-skeleton) "like Microsoft"

Technically this feature was very non-techy, clearly aimed for the general public.

But the interesting part I think, is that a general newschannel spends (prime) air time on this subject, probably shows how well spread the OSS and Linux phenomena is starting to become. And please note, they didn't mention the trial or the Halloween documents, so it was not aired as a direct reaction to them.

It's one thing if computer-magazines do linux features, now it is considered news for the mainstream!